


We Can Still Have Fun (The Annotated Edition)

by pocky_slash



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Books, Canon Disabled Character, Embedded Images, Established Relationship, Gen, M/M, Mixed Media, Old Married Couple, Old mutants in love, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-20
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-09 07:15:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1973739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocky_slash/pseuds/pocky_slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Xavier, Dr. Charles F. <em>Children of the Atom: Mutants in the 1960s</em>. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994.</p>
<p>Lehnsherr, Erik. <em>The Next Stage of Evolution: How Human Politics are Stifling Mutant Growth</em>. New York: Posthuman Press, 2002.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [listerinezero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/listerinezero/gifts).
  * Inspired by [We Can Still Have Fun](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1073819) by [listerinezero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/listerinezero/pseuds/listerinezero). 



> A few of Erik's annotations, as well as the title of Charles' book come from **listerinezero** 's excellent original story. Endless thanks to [redacted] for helping with some of the annotations, beta-reading, cheerleading, and test-driving the formatting.
> 
> The story below is told through six large embedded images. For a text-only version of this story, please see chapter two.

_From_ Children of the Atom: Mutants in the 1960s _by Dr. Charles Xavier (with annotations in blue pen by Erik Lehnsherr) page 101:_

  
  
  


_From_ Children of the Atom: Mutants in the 1960s _by Dr. Charles Xavier (with annotations in blue pen by Erik Lehnsherr) page 243:_

  
  
  


_From_ Children of the Atom: Mutants in the 1960s _by Dr. Charles Xavier (with annotations in blue pen by Erik Lehnsherr) page 322:_

  
  
  


* * *

_From_ The Next Stage of Evolution: How Human Politics are Stifling Mutant Growth _by Erik Lehnsherr (with annotations in black ink by Dr. Charles Xavier) page 110:_

  
  
  


_From_ The Next Stage of Evolution: How Human Politics are Stifling Mutant Growth _by Erik Lehnsherr (with annotations in black ink by Dr. Charles Xavier) page 206:_

  
  
  


_From_ The Next Stage of Evolution: How Human Politics are Stifling Mutant Growth _by Erik Lehnsherr (with annotations in black ink by Dr. Charles Xavier) page 291:_

  
  



	2. Text-only version

_From_ Children of the Atom: Mutants in the 1960s _by Dr. Charles Xavier (with annotations in blue pen by Erik Lehnsherr) page 101:_

> someone in the water. In the chaos and confusion of those first few minutes, even my telepathy could make neither heads nor tails of what was happening around us. Between the telepathic attack by Emma Frost--which I would later learn included a shift to her diamond form that ejected me sharply from her mind--and the general discordant maelstrom of the minds of those on the Coast Guard boats, it was difficult to make sense of anything.
> 
> At least, until I heard a sharp, brilliant, blinding mind call out for help.¹
> 
> In all my years, I had never experienced anything quite like it. The mind that was grasping at mine was doing so entirely unconsciously. This was not a matter of someone projecting, but rather someone so desperate that his mind had lit up like a beacon. The thoughts running through his mind were some of the most painful I'd ever felt, laced with an unwavering determination, even as he was drowning in the water. You see, the mind belonged to Erik Lehnsherr, known briefly to the world as Magneto, and he was on the tail of the Nazi scientist who had tortured him while he was imprisoned in a concentration camp, in order to study his mutation. Erik was prepared to die on his quest to destroy Sebastian Shaw, and as he spent longer and longer underwater, clinging to Shaw's retreating submarine, it became clear he was close to succeeding--not in killing Shaw, but in killing himself.²
> 
> I couldn't stand for it. Rarely can I ignore anyone asking for help that strongly, from a deep, subconscious part of themselves, but Erik's mind was singular and beautiful and a part of him called out to a part of me. I had no name for it at the time, I knew only that I could not allow this man to die.³
> 
> I called first for the Coast Guard to send someone after him, then shouted my appeal to the other CIA agents on the boat. When it became clear all those around me were preoccupied⁴ with the attack from Shaw's cohorts and the sub's escape, I didn't hesitate before stripping off my coat and shoes and jumping into the water to save the man myself.

 

¹ I absolutely did not!  
² So overdramatic.  
³ Such a romantic.  
⁴ Useless humans, all of them.

 

 _From_ Children of the Atom: Mutants in the 1960s _by Dr. Charles Xavier (with annotations in blue pen by Erik Lehnsherr) page 243:_

> was clear it would be difficult getting her out as the CIA had the building surrounded. We needed to think quickly, and it's here that I admit that I shoulder some of the blame for what followed: I asked Erik to create a distraction so that the child and I could slip out the back, where there were fewer agents and I could more easily turn their eyes away from us.
> 
> Of course, what follows is captured in the history books. Magneto raising cars off of the street and crashing them together mid-air, a helicopter pulled to the ground, fire hydrants bursting and sending streams of water into the air to frame the destruction taking place on the street. He pulled the guns and radios from all of the agents and officers present and broke them to pieces before releasing them in a rain of metal filings and unbroken plastic and rubber components.¹
> 
> It was more than I expected, to put it lightly, and certainly more than the other theatre attendees and civilians expected. I must admit, though--the screaming and panic that ensued was more than enough for all three of us to lose ourselves in the crowd and return to the waiting car some blocks away.² 
> 
> It's a miracle that Erik's face was not fully caught on tape, as that certainly would have been the downfall of our fledgling school. It nearly was, regardless. After so many months of putting off arguments in deference to my rehabilitation from my spinal injury and the heavy guilt that followed Erik whenever he looked at my wheelchair, we had reached the tipping point. We could no longer ignore the issues that remained between us, the disagreements on both the best way to proceed with shepherding the mutant population forward and the place for baseline humans in the new world we were intent on creating.³
> 
> We returned to the school without speaking, save to comfort our newest pupil. Once she was in bed, however, the two of us were left alone⁴ with our differing opinions and the anger and shame still coursing through us after the events in the city. We dispensed with pretense entirely--we were accustomed to ending each night with a game of chess and a nightcap, but instead we retired not to the library, but to the down

 

¹ You told me you wanted me to make a scene--what did you expect?  
² See? It worked!  
³ What a polite way to put it.  
⁴ Hardly alone! McCoy and MacTaggert were incandescently angry.

 

 _From_ Children of the Atom: Mutants in the 1960s _by Dr. Charles Xavier (with annotations in blue pen by Erik Lehnsherr) page 322:_

> was to be the summer of change. It seems the O'Hare incident was to indeed be a tipping point, but not in the way Erik had predicted.
> 
> On a hazy summer morning¹, I received a phone call from a gentleman named Dr. Robert Doyle. Robert and I had studied at Oxford together and spent many long nights in the lab and library arguing about the future of human evolution². He was a professor at Columbia, now, and wanted to meet with me, not at the university, but out in the suburbs. I agreed to the meeting, to the shock and frustration of my companions, and arranged to see him late Friday afternoon at a diner in Chappaqua. I had prepared to be on the defensive--I could tell, even over the phone and without the aid of my telepathy, that this was going to be more than just a meeting between old university friends. Robert had been nervous as he spoke, and I was already imagining the worst.
> 
> I had Hank and Erik accompany me to the meeting, keeping at a distance, and had alerted Moira to the meeting and promised to call her in the evening to confirm I was in one piece, lest she bring the full power of her S.H.I.E.L.D. team down upon Robert as well as the whole of Columbia University as an institution.³ 
> 
> I can't say, even with those protections in place, even with my telepathy, that I wasn't nervous. The few old friends and acquaintances that had contacted me since the news broke had mostly been gawkers. I was certain that wasn't Robert's motivation, but unsure of what his true motive was until he entered the diner and I did a quick sweep of his mind for my own safety. Even then, I didn't believe it until he spoke the words for himself.
> 
> Robert wasn't meeting with me to kidnap me, to study me, or to rubberneck my sudden notoriety. Robert was here because he wanted to propose a course for the next fall's term at Columbia, a course on mutants in society. 
> 
> He quickly explained that he had only just been granted tenure and he was unsure of whether the board would ever approve of such a radical course. It might, he explained, be more suited for Sociology or Political Sci-

 

¹ This happened in the fall, not the summer--I remember you were wearing that hideous green corduroy jacket with the elbow patches.  
² That's not all you spend long nights doing, I have it on good authority.  
³ MacTaggert has good instincts, I'll give her that.

* * *

_From_ The Next Stage of Evolution: How Human Politics are Stifling Mutant Growth _by Erik Lehnsherr (with annotations in black ink by Dr. Charles Xavier) page 110:_

> and yet the Mutant voice remains unheard in that arena. At a time when our children are being beaten and worse by the baseline bullies they are forced to mingle with in order to receive the education that is their right in this country¹, this is what we fall back on.
> 
> The focus should be turned to destroying the status quo and forging a new solution, not helplessly trying to fix a system that was against our kind from the start. One or two Mutant authors do not reflect the diversity and depth of our stories. One or two weeks out of the year is not enough to contain the history of our kind. Classes focused on containing, hiding, or "controlling" our gifts are poisoning our youth with the idea that there are parts of themselves that need to be contained, hidden, or controlled, that they are not free to be who they are.²
> 
> If every mutant parent pulled their children out of America's public school system at this very moment, the problem would need to be addressed, but would it be enough? Can we trust baseline humans to create a safe space for future generations when they've had fifty years and have yet to create one for current generations?
> 
> The answer is no. We cannot leave our fate and the fate of our children in these hands. If we have any hope of breaking free of the neglect and abuse of a system skewed against us, the only hope is to create our own. It falls on us to pave the way for the next generation, to educate our youth, to teach them the roots of our kind, the struggles, the triumphs, and the work yet to do. The only way for us to succeed in this is to completely remove Mutant children from the American public education system.³
> 
> Although this may seem like a radical approach, it is also the approach that promises to deliver the best possible

¹ Ignoring the Hillman-Vega report findings again, I see...  
² It's about making them feel SAFE in their skin!  
³ There are so many issues with this I don't know where to start.

 

 _From_ The Next Stage of Evolution: How Human Politics are Stifling Mutant Growth _by Erik Lehnsherr (with annotations in black ink by Dr. Charles Xavier) page 206:_

> infrastructure is laughably inadequate for our population.  
>  That's not to say that our kind should be free from that level of judgement or above the judicial system. There are Mutants who are motivated by greed, who commit acts of unwarranted destruction, who attack other Mutants, who are guilty of any number of crimes. They are not beyond punishment for these acts, but the current United States law offers the right of judgement by a jury of one's peers, and baseline humans will never fit that definition where Mutants are concerned.¹ 
> 
> In 1999, Liu did a second study on Mutants in the judicial system and this time included data collected from human members of juries in Mutant cases. The results astonished the public, but were not shocking to the Mutants reading the report: over thirty percent of humans on Mutant juries admit to having anti-Mutant biases, over fifty percent voted for Registration, and over seventy percent reported they felt Mutants were more dangerous on the whole than baseline humans. And yet, these humans that consider Mutants to be a danger are the supposedly impartial peers that decide a Mutant's fate.²
> 
> The deficiencies of the justice system don't end there. Convicted Mutants are brought to prisons that are laughably ill-equipped to deal with them. Even the costly "Mutant Containment" wings suffer from the inability to cater to a population with wide-ranging abilities that often cancel each other out. Enhanced, double-plated doors and walls made of concrete triple-enforced with steel girders are nothing to a Mutant who can manipulate magnetic fields--the entire complex can be crumpled with nothing more than a gesture.³ Should the prison be stripped of metal and replaced with organic materials, that too will become useless the day they imprison a Mutant with a command over carbon or organic matter.

¹ Claremont v. New York!!  
² You're ignoring some crucial findings from Marjorie's study.  
³ Pretentious! Nobody like a braggart, darling.

 

 _From_ The Next Stage of Evolution: How Human Politics are Stifling Mutant Growth _by Erik Lehnsherr (with annotations in black ink by Dr. Charles Xavier) page 291:_

> or as it's known in feminist theory, "intersectionality." It's a vital notion, particularly in a world that strives to paint all Mutants with the same brush, to turn us all in the worst of our kind. The blame does not rest only with our oppressors, however. Mutants are guilty of the same, banding together a whole, when our personal politics and histories are sometimes contradictory, not to mention the manifestation and types of mutations we possess.¹
> 
> Although we are all united by our mutations, our lives and legacies are spread across the globe. We have different skin color, come from all classes, and encompass all genders. The experience of a female straight Chinese hydrotechnic will differ vastly than that of a gay white American man with the gift of flight. While we have many common goals, it is important to acknowledge that all of our goals are not always the same, lest we have another disaster like the Castro riot in 1994. 
> 
> I was present for that altercation, along with my longtime partner, Dr. Charles Xavier, a powerful telepath. He did not need his telepathy, however, to predict with uncharacteristic foresight² that trouble was brewing behind the scenes of the San Francisco Mutant Equality Speakout. At the time, I foolishly waved off his concerns, only to be horrorstruck as the event devolved into in-fighting and chaos. I was disgusted to see my own kind, fellow Mutants, violently lashing out against their own, shouting homosexual slurs and threatening violence. 
> 
> That day, I was an outcast among my own people, people who looked to me as a leader. Worse yet, the human media latched onto our internal discord and attempted to exploit it as a weakness in our movement.³
> 
> For that reason and more, it is vitally important that we acknowledge our differences while striving ever forward towards Mutant equality. Division and cruelty within our

¹ It took almost 300 pages, but FINALLY.  
² I'm not sure if I should be flattered...  
³ Of course, it's all about the humans.

**Author's Note:**

> Charles' book is typeset in Garamond Premier.  
> Erik's book is typeset in Olympian LT Std.


End file.
